I don't normally comment on movies but a political blog on world affairs should have something to say about the Oliver Stone "W" movie, starring Josh Brolin.

This is a very good movie.

I can't comment on the acting ability, music and all the other aspects that absorb the attention of professional movie critics.

I have come at this task simply from the point of view someone interested in world affairs.

Is this movie a good introduction to explaining the slide towards the Iraq War in 2003? Yes.

The movie, among other things, brings out the conflicting interpretations of why the US (and UK and Australia) violated international law and attacked Iraq:

1. Bush (according to the movie) was trying to do better than his father. George Bush senior ("Bush 41") drove Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 but did not move into Iraq itself to remove Saddam Hussein. This angered US conservatives at the time. But it was a smart policy. The international coalition (which included many Arab states) would not have kept together in supporting a US invasion of Iraq, a fellow Arab state. It would also have made the US an occupying power in a hostile territory. Bush 41 - and then his successor Bill Clinton - had the policy of keeping Saddam Hussein down but not out (in the hope he would reform himself and provide the US with an opportunity to get Iraq back on the list of oil sellers). Hussein never understood the script and eventually perished thanks to his own stupidity. The son therefore did better than the father (or so he hoped).

2. George W Bush - the 43rd president in US history - wanted revenge for the September 11 2001 ("9/11") terrorist attacks. The obvious country to have attacked would have been Saudi Arabia, which produced most of the terrorists involved in the attacks and was the original home of Osama bin Laden and his brand of extreme Islamism. But the west can't touch the world's most important oil supplier. The Afghan Taleban government had given shelter to Osama bin Laden and refused to hand him over and so Afghanistan was attacked. But the country had been wracked by war since at least the 1979 Soviet invasion and so there were few targets left standing. Something more substantial was required - hence Iraq supplied the target.

3. I was in New York in September 2002 for Channel 7 "Sunrise" to cover the 1st anniversary of 9/11 terrorist attacks. I was at the UN General Assembly on September 12 for Bush's speech in which he announced that he was going after Iraq. We were surprised by all the attention to Saddam Hussein (who had had no connection at all with 9/11) and the neglect of Osama bin Laden. The movie shows how little Bush evidently thought about Osama bin Laden. He was fixated on Saddam Hussein and Bush's fanciful idea that removing him would be easy (just as the Soviet Union had collapsed at the end of the Cold War with virtually no shots fired).

4. Bush 43 had no "exit strategy". One of the most chilling parts of the movie was when the actor playing Vice President Dick Cheney explained that the US had no exit strategy because none was required. The US was going to stay. Iraq is a major oil producer (Cheney has a background in the oil industry and so knows about the looming global oil crisis). He knew about the particular importance of Iraqi oil. Iraq would also be a good base for other military operations in the Middle East (such as against Iran, which used to be the main US military ally in the Gulf before the extremists took over in 1979). The war, in this interpretation, was therefore about oil and military leverage.

The movie, in short, is a good introduction to this tragic era of world affairs.

Unfortunately the movie has been released in Australia well after its circulation in the US - and by the time that Bush 43 has become history. I can't understand the logic of that poor commercial decision. It now has a very limited life left on the Australian movie circuit.

Try to see it as a video - you can see a trailer of W movie here.

Keith Suter.